NORRISTOWN — By the time British songstress Petula Clark’s anthem “Downtown” was at the top of the music charts in 1964, many folks around here may have been wondering where in the world this mythical downtown paradise existed.

Who was forgetting all their troubles and cares, as the song suggested, in downtown Norristown?

In his new book, “What Killed Downtown?: Norristown, Pennsylvania, From Main Street to the Malls,” Michael Tolle leaves the wide-eyed romanticism to the songwriters and poets as he keenly examines why once vibrant small-town urban centers across America succumbed to economic and social disintegration in the second half of the 20th Century.

The one-time history professor and former Historical Society of Montgomery County chronicler smiled as he recalled a longtime Norristown resident questioning his right to pen a book about a town where he never lived.

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“She was one of the classic North end people who had more knowledge of the people of Norristown than anybody I ever met,” said Tolle. “She said, ‘no offense, but you couldn’t possibly write a history of Norristown because you didn’t live here.’ That’s the attitude most people have.”

Tolle’s response to the woman echoed an axiom that is universally held by historians: “The history of anything is almost impossible to write if you participated in it. What I discovered, the hard way, is that the statement of never writing about something you were involved in is true. Every historian knows that. If you were there you have already gotten yourself in a position that prevents you from taking a balanced look. You really need to be an outsider to give balanced judgment.”

Tolle is not entirely an “outsider,” nor is his tome technically a history of Norristown.

Tolle moved to Jeffersonville in 1974 with his wife and lived there for 34 years before relocating to San Francisco — a town, which oddly enough, he said is now suffering from the same problems that ostensibly “murdered” the hamlet that serves as the metaphor for the collapse of downtown America in his book, Norristown.

“When I moved to the area, in West Norriton, people were telling me ‘don’t go into Norristown because you’re going to get robbed. There’s nothing there. It’s all torn down.’ And I never did go into Norristown,” said the Kansas native. “When I took a job with the Historical Society in the early ‘90s I really began to learn more about Montgomery County and Norristown. By the time I got to know anything about Norristown it was in pretty bad condition.”

The Norristown of the ‘90s bore no resemblance to the thriving pre-World II berg it had been for nearly a century, Tolle said.

“It had been an enormously popular and profitable commercial center for well over 100 years. The mystery is why did it go down sometime after the second World War and never come back?”

That timeline of decline did not originate with Tolle but with the authors of “Montgomery County, the Second Hundred Years,” published in 1983.

“By then Norristown was a scene of quiet desolation,” Tolle said. “It declined in many ways and I began to realize that what happened to Norristown was similar to what happened in thousands of communities in the 1950s, ‘60s and ‘70s.”

Tolle references The Times Herald and other sources extensively in his book, and draws from interviews with many of the area’s notables, including

“I describe Norristown in 1950, not just the stores and traffic, but the culture of the town,” he said. “I tried to recreate a world that is virtually gone.”

The book goes into painstaking detail as it lists a number of social and economic executioners in the absorbing “whodunit.”

Though the historic crossroads of non-rural decline and rampant suburbanization as it uncoiled between the years 1950 – when the Pennsylvania Turnpike came to King of Prussia – and 1975 is hardly coincidental, none of the conventional wisdom that usually attempts to explain it applied to Norristown, Tolle said.

“It wasn’t a one-industry or -company town that suffered when that industry folded. It had a very balanced nature of employment for its people.

It wasn’t one of those towns that got an interstate highway built next to it and then died. Whatever happened to Norristown was fundamental enough that it applies elsewhere. That was my hope when I started. I never intended to write a book about Norristown that was meant to be read only by people in Norristown.”

The book needed to have a more global purpose, or he wasn’t interested in writing it, Tolle admitted.

“It struck me that the very same issues that Norristown began to deal with back in the 1930s and ‘40s that contributed to its death still exist in virtually every urban grid today. We have not solved a single one of the problems that Norristown struggled with and failed to resolve many decades ago.”

Transportation and parking are equal opportunity villains named as suspects in “What Killed Downtown?”, as are local and county governments.

While the typical ideology will cite shopping malls and centers in the demise of downtown, Tolle maintains that the appearance of the King of Prussia mall merely dealt the final blow to downtown.

After all, it appeared nearly a decade after Polk City Directories theorized that Main Street’s decline began, in the mid-1950s.

“What I discovered was that downtown Norristown had been losing stores at an increasing rate prior to the opening of the King of Prussia mall,” noted Tolle, who will be speaking about his book at the Historical Society, 1654 DeKalb St., Norristown, on Sunday at 2:30 p.m., and at the Montgomery County-Norristown Public Library on Wednesday, 11 a.m.

“Yes, malls delivered the crushing blow, but Norristown was already in decline before the mall even opened. The opening of Logan Square in 1952 was a seminal event in the history of Norristown, when stores like Sears began moving from Main Street to the peripheral.”

The book rattles off a string of subsequent stars in the death-of-downtown-Norristown story, including the departure of Chatlin’s department store, amazingly inept officials who didn’t believe in paying taxes, a high-tech-for-1960 parking-garage “solution” straight out of a Jetsons cartoon, and, perhaps most notoriously and emblematically, the rise and fall of the Valley Forge Hotel.

“The hotel, which wasn’t really a hotel at all, was Norristown’s property from the day it opened in 1925, belonging to investors, and lost money every year it remained open after that until 1974,” said Tolle, who believes his book will be an eye-opener even to current county and Borough officials.

“I was talking on the phone to a County Commissioner who had absolutely no idea that the county had ever been involved on Main Street at all,” Tolle said.

His hope is to spark conversation, and most of all, a cautious awareness about the future.

“I didn’t want to, like so many do, write a book that was only going to be read by the people of Norristown and would sit in the Historical Society,” Tolle said. “I want this to be a beginning and use the experience of Norristown to help the town and other communities. If you want to understand the collapse you must understand why the town was so popular at one time.”